By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A national livestock group has filed an appeal with the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the EPA’s latest rule regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Assoc. (NCBA), along with the Coalition for Responsible Regulation and other groups filed the appeal challenging the EPA’s rule. The rule was published on April 2. NCBA’s appeal was also made on April 2.

The latest EPA rule, one of several that flows out of a Supreme Court decision that EPA could regulate GHGs under certain conditions, reconsidered the so-called Johnson memo. The memo was a discussion of when GHGs are subject to a federal permit program.

According to the latest EPA rule, “the Memo was necessary after issues were raised regarding the scope of pollutants that should be addressed in ... permitting actions following the Supreme Court’s April 2, 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA ...”

In that decision, the court “held that GHGs, including carbon dioxide (CO2), fit within the definition of air pollutant in the CAA (Clean Air Act) ... The Court found that, in accordance with CAA section 202(a), EPA was required to determine whether or not emissions of GHGs from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, or whether the science is too uncertain to make a reasoned decision.”

According to the folks at the NCBA as well as other groups, there is plenty of scientific uncertainty surrounding the global warming issue, which is what the EPA was referring to when it discussed an endangerment to public health in its rule published last December.
According to a statement issued by the EPA on this issue, updated last Friday, “after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled three years ago that greenhouse gas emissions constitute air pollution, EPA set out to determine whether that pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans. In doing so EPA undertook a comprehensive and transparent review of the soundest available science. That science came from an array of highly respected, peer-reviewed sources from both within the United States and across the globe, and took into consideration hundreds of thousands of comments from members of the public, which were addressed in the finding. The conclusion: the scientific evidence of climate change is overwhelming and greenhouse gases pose a real threat to the American people. The question of the science is settled.”
The NCBA and other groups strongly disagree.

“The science does not justify the regulation and we’re arguing that the EPA should let democracy work and let Congress decide if it wants to regulate GHGs,” said Tamara Thies, chief environmental attorney for the NCBA.

Thies brought up the issue of “Climategate,” the controversy surrounding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia recently, where research data and statistics were said to have been manipulated to make the case stronger for human caused global warming.

In its petition to the EPA administrator appealing its human endangerment finding regarding GHGs, NCBA and other groups pointed to the controversy to strengthen its case.

According to the petition, submitted to the agency Feb. 11, Climategate revealed “CRU fudged and fabricated temperature data. These unsound data likely underlie much of the science informing the (United Nations’) assessment reports upon which EPA places ‘primary and significant weight’ in reaching its Finding. ... EPA does not know, and has made no publicly-disclosed effort to determine, whether its Finding relies on unsound data. As a result, the (endangerment) Finding cannot stand.

“Further, although EPA asserts that these underlying data have been ‘extensively peer reviewed,’ ... the Disclosures call into question the sufficiency and independence of this peer review process, both for the CRU dataset and the other surface-based temperature datasets. In sum, EPA’s Endangerment Finding has at its foundation flawed data and suspect science.”

None of this or the other contentions the NCBA made in its petition prevented the EPA from making another rule, the one regarding the Johnson memo and now the matter is in court. According to the NCBA, there will be a “cascade” of rulings by the EPA flowing out of the Supreme Court’s decision and the EPA’s endangerment finding. The groups are also worried about the potential economic impact of GHG regulation.

“We think it would have sweeping impacts on agriculture and the entire economy,” said Bethany Shively, a spokeswoman for the NCBA.